The Optimal Horizon provides the direction. The intermediate horizons provide the path. How to choose them, and what makes a good one.
Most organizations have several horizons between where they are today and where they ultimately want to be. Often, there are so many horizons that teams are paralyzed by the options before them. Naming those horizons well and prioritizing them is some of the most important work a leadership team can do.
One horizon might establish reliable data. Another might streamline core processes. Another might connect systems, strengthen financial visibility, or give leadership better tools for making decisions. None of them is the destination. Each of them makes the next one possible.
The Optimal Horizon provides the direction. The intermediate horizons provide the path.
What makes a good intermediate horizon
Not every milestone is a horizon. A horizon is a new vantage point: once you reach it, you can see and do things you couldn’t before. When I help teams name theirs, I look for three qualities.
- It’s valuable on its own. If the work stopped there, the organization would still be meaningfully better off.
- It opens the next one. Reaching it creates the information, capacity or trust the following horizon depends on.
- People can recognize it. The team can say, plainly, how they will know they’ve arrived.
Order matters
The hardest part is usually not naming the horizons. It’s agreeing on the order. Everyone has a favorite problem, and every problem feels urgent from where that person sits. A useful test is to ask which horizon, once reached, would make the others easier. Reliable information often comes first for exactly that reason: it changes the quality of every decision after it. Assessment of the full picture is key. Alignment around impact is critical.
Expect the path to change
The intermediate horizons are a plan, not a promise. From each one you’ll see farther than you could before, and sometimes what you see will change the route. That isn’t the plan failing. That’s the plan working.
In an Optimal Horizon Workshop this is the third step, Build, where the room answers “What are the horizons in between?” The team names two or three intermediate horizons, what stands in the way of each, and the order in which to address them for maximum impact. It’s often the moment a room full of competing priorities becomes a team with a shared one: Aligned to Build and Strengthen.